WHAT HAPPENED TO E-LEARNING?
The complete report is available online, at no cost, in PDF format at. The Weatherstation Project was conceived as "an antidote to those first descriptions of the market for e-learning, which were often warped by missing data and overly hopeful assumptions about how quickly new products would come to market and how receptive learners and instructors were likely to be."
"Thwarted Innovation: What Happened to E-learning and Why" presents the results of the Weatherstation Project of The Learning Alliance at the University of Pennsylvania. This study sought to answer the question "Why did the boom in e-learning go bust?" Over an eighteen-month period authors Robert Zemsky, an education professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and William F. Massy, professor emeritus of education and business administration at Stanford University, tracked faculty and staff attitudes towards e-learning at six colleges and universities. Their findings challenged three prevalent e-learning assumptions:

If we build it they will come -- not so;

The kids will take to e-learning like ducks to water -- not quite;

E-learning will force a change in the way we teach -- not by a long shot.

"Is Anyone Making Money on Distance Education?" (CHE, February 16, 2001, p. A41) "While distance-education programs are not going under like their dot-com counterparts, administrators are recognizing that the costs of expanding programs are -- in some cases -- greater than had been anticipated," writes Sarah Carr inAnd "[s]ome researchers describe the list of potential costs as never-ending and, in the final analysis, unknowable."

"Author Says Colleges Must Reallocate Money to Academic Technology" (by Florence Olsen, CHE, February 27, 2001, A. W. (Tony) Bates, director of distance education and technology in the Continuing Studies Division at the University of British Columbia, says that "colleges will have to reallocate money from other accounts to pay for essential academic-technology projects. And that's easier said than done. . . "